The soaring, uplifting chug of Bear v. Shark’s “Ma Jolie” flooded her brain space. The dream snapped and she was awake.
It was the dead of night. All was still. “Ma Jolie” was her favorite song, and she’d adopted the opening chord progression as her morning alarm. She checked her phone: it hadn’t gone off. She checked the time. 4:27 a.m. The night was long and still.
Try as she might, she was unable to fall back asleep.
>< >< ><
“Man,” Julia said, when her three best friends were all seated at the lunch room table the following day, “I used to be jealous of people who could remember their dreams. Not anymore. I had the most fucked-up dream last night.”
Clare, Venice, and Lynn didn’t jump immediately at the bait like Julia hoped. They were still adjusting themselves, putting their bookbags under the seat, and readying their trays around the table in the outside courtyard. It was chilly outside, but they had warm down jackets and had braved the cold to at least sit outside and get peace and quiet from the loud, obnoxious cafeteria and the table-spanning, shouted conversations.
They were all sixteen and halfway through their junior years at Lakewood High school in Shrub Oak, New York, a middle-class, undistinguished suburb about an hour north of Manhattan. All of them came from families who had uprooted themselves from New York City with hopes of securing themselves a piece of the suburban American dream, decisions made by New Yorkers who lived their formative years in the 1970s and 1980s, when New York City was a metonym for urban disorder. Now, of course, New York City was a locus point of gentrification and the suburbs were steadily and rapidly absorbing the fallout of the recession. Each year, it seemed there were less and less places to go, the odd inverse relationship of more people yet more shuttered businesses. The local Jefferson Valley Mall had just, for example, been placed on the Dying Malls website. All four of them resented losing their New York City birthright, and for what? The drabness of the suburbs with none of the supposed benefits. Suburbs weren’t even safer, if you thought about it. More teenagers die from car accidents than gun fire.
Venice took the bait first. Venice was the tallest of group, six foot-one, with long, curly raven hair, a stud tongue ring and belly-button ring, a toothy smile and a subtly elongated facial bone structure that made her resemble a horse. Not really in a bad way; she was pretty and fit and equine in the same way as Julia Roberts. Out of the group, the boys were perhaps most interested in her, some combination of her fit body, her big mouth, her erotic name, and the halo effects of her belly button and tongue rings, which created associations about body image and sexual proclivities that were entirely incidental.
“So, what was it about?” Venice asked.
“A long conversation with a monster about dying.”
“Sounds pretty cool to me.”
“Yeah,” Lynn joined in. “Your plea for sympathy is hereby rejected. I am officially jealous. My dreams are always boring.” That last point wasn’t true, not recently, but she let the comment stand.
Lynn was bundled especially warmly in a green, cozy-looking knit sweater, which was appropriate for her. She had big clunky brown glasses and the fact that they made her look geek-chic-sexy was purely adventitious. She was short, pert and peppy, about 5’5” and a natural blue-eyed blonde, with a mane which she kept long and well-mannered. Under alternative circumstances — meaning, if you knew nothing about her personality — one could easily imagine her as a cheerleader. Yet no one acted like that was true — years later, classmates would reminisce about her and talk about how cute she was and ponder how odd it was that it seemed like no one ever dated her. Instead of social climbing or dating, she applied that natural pep and go-getterism to doing well in school, fastidiously finishing tasks, getting OCD about her favorite musical genres (emocore and upbeat pop-punk) and making sure her much younger sister got the proper exposure to books and culture.
“Yeah, sounds like a humble-brag to me. What did the monster look like? Was it cool looking?” That was Clare, in between bites of overcooked, droopy school pizza.
“I guess so. It smelled really badly. I was impressed, actually, that my mind could render something like that. I didn’t get a good look at the background, though.”
Clare was the only one of them who had a boyfriend, which wasn’t what you’d expect. She was pleasant and innocuous, an affable wallflower given to bouts of social anxiety. As if form met function, she had a mousy look, with matted-looking brown hair, average height and average weight and a curiously sedimentary, layered countenance, kind of rough and porous, with an atypical bone structure. She had a tendency to sniff her food before eating it, although she only did that in front of her close friends these days. She spoke with a slight lisp, which felt right, given the intangible curiosity of her face.
To boys, she was a nice, pleasant presence, as she had that air of non-judgmental obtainability about her. That’s perhaps what lead to her being the only one with a boyfriend, although truth be told, the other girls weren’t too concerned about having boyfriends. Clare’s boyfriend, Isaac, fit in nicely to their group-centrism, as he was two years older and busy with Westchester Community College and his side job doing light carpentry work for his father. Isaac, when he was around, was an unobtrusive presence, a nod of the head, a filled seat on the couch.
“I had a crazy dream too. I just can’t even remember it. I just remember thinking it was crazy. It’s weird because I’ve been reading a lot — “ Clare pulled out a used paperback, Storm Front, by Jim Butcher — “it’s cool, it’s got a lot of monsters and supernatural stuff and wizards in it, so I’m disappointed I didn’t have a great, vivid dream that I remembered. Usually when I read, my memory gets sharper. I’m jealous, you must be gifted.”
“You sounded so cute. If you were a hamster I’d just want to take you home,” said Lynn. “Wh-is-zzards”: she did her best approximation of how Clare lisped the word.
“”Thwwww-wizzards,” Venice exaggerated it, using deposited saliva and her tongue ring to great effect. “I love it. How you can be reading that” — Venice looked at the paperback — “oh, I’ve been meaning to read that actually, heard it’s good, but how you are reading that before Hitchhiker’s Guide is a crime against the universe and a personal insult to me. Do you even still have it?”
“I’ll get into it, I promise.”
“You have to make good on your promises. Your cute lisp can’t save you forever.”
“She’s done pretty well with it for sixteen years,” Lynn deadpanned.
“She perfected it before she could even speak,” Julia dead-panned back. They all took pleasure in teasing each other for lapses in logic, malapropisms, and the like. One time Julia pronounced “automaton” as “auto-mate-on” and Lynn had a field day.
“I know, that’s what makes it so effective. When you can master something before you even do it, that’s the only way you can really be called a Master. You can only be a Master if you can perfect something before you can even do it.”
“An illogical but airtight quandary.”
“Airtight. Viciously airtight in its ill-logic. Which makes it all the more effective.”
They went on for a bit with this inspired nonsense. They could riff off each other all day. They had enough rapport, in-jokes, and meta-references for a Wikipedia entry.
They talked and ate — with a couple call-backs to the lisp-y noises and the foolish Mastery Paradox. Julia ate the peanut-butter sandwich and apple she brought from home and enjoyed the company.
>< >< ><
Julia found herself at the same lunch table under almost identical circumstances. She unwrapped her lunch and again, it was a homemade sandwich, same coarse brown wheat bread, same shiny Red Delicious apple. She unwrapped the sandwich out of the tinfoil and bit into it. It was chewier, smushier than usual, with an overpowering texture on one side and abrasive crunchy pieces on the o
ther. The fractious mismatch of textures made chewing difficult. She opened up her sandwich. It was, literally, peanuts-and-butter. Half of the bread was slicked heavy with dairy butter. The other half was a deposit of whole peanuts.
How could this be possible? Under no circumstances does someone say “Hey, I made a mistake. Instead of peanut butter, I used peanuts-and-butter.” Under what sort of haze would someone have to be in to literally take out ill-fitting, cumbersome solid peanuts, and tuck them into one side of the bread, and then slop on a gag-inducing amount of butter onto another side of bread and smush the two pieces together?
She opened up the sandwich to show her friends, as prima facie evidence that something was wrong. The thing spoke for itself.
None of her friends seemed to notice or comment on it.
“My dreams have been weird, too,” said Lynn. Lynn was probably the sharpest of the four friends, so Julia was interested in what she had to say. “They are interesting though. I’m interested in them, and what they have to show me.”
Julia hmm’ed. That’s an even-keeled attitude to have, she thought She was speaking to Lynn without seeing her, she realized. She did her best to look at her, but couldn’t conjure up a vision of what Lynn looked like. As if in consolation, a show of defeat, she associated her with a green, warm-looking sweater and tight black pants. Was Lynn wearing the same green shirt as yesterday? No, she didn’t really wear tight black pants, but they’d suit her in her subtle way.
That wasn’t fair, she thought. They were sitting around the table but no one else was eating. When she wasn’t looking at Lynn, she seemed to disappear. No one was talking. Maybe James and his group of friends who shared the courtyard with them were doing something interesting and distracting. James’ group and their group were cool with each other and sometimes met up, went to local music shows to see the same shitty local bands. She turned and there was nothing behind her. Literally nothing — it’s as if she turned her head to espy a niveous stain with the intensity of a supernova.
Her subconscious stirred slightly at the thought of a brief, frustrating fight with her mother. She’d said something mean and impatient toward her mother, more out of hunger pangs and frustration than anything else. But how did that make sense? The timing was all wrong, this was lunch time, she was at school.
Venice spoke while two hands emerged from her mouth, each hand pushing her jaws in opposite directions. Her longish face became even longer, her chin descended at least an inch and her mouth jutted forward, giving her a hook-like shovel face. She didn’t scream or react hysterically, but her voice abruptly cut out. The upper part of her face bulged out narrowly, like the beak of a bird.
The top of a figure emerged from her mouth as her body crumpled and broke off around her. That’s not right, Julia thought. Venice’s body should be gore and viscera, blood everywhere, a horror show. Instead, the top-half of a figure just stood upright through Venice’s baleen mouth, unfolding and ascending upward in a standing position. Like a seed rapidly germinating into a flower, rising from the flower pot that was Venice’s impossibly solid and overstretched jaws.
The figure fully emerged and Venice bloodlessly broke off and tumbled away, like detritus thrown overboard on a moving ship.
“This is another dream,” the figure told her. It was silver and featureless, just the outline of a human shape. The dimensions didn’t make sense but it was bigger and vaster than she.
“You are dreaming. I’m not here to hurt you. I apologize for however I look to you, if I frighten you. Your brain perceives me as a threat and will do whatever it can to make me seem threatening. Just as it comes so naturally to you to assign negative attributes to spiders or snakes, your brain does the same with me. Just remember that the spider or snake is not evil. It just is, and your brain communicates what it needs to communicate to you to keep you living and procreating.
“Your brain — including the parasites that control it and the forces of natural evolution — does everything within its power to convince you to procreate and extend your genetic legacy. It does what it does. It’s a program.
“I am here to offer you a reprieve from living and procreating. No living thing can ever know whether life has been worth living without first experiencing the sensation of dying. No one who has ever died can testify to the experience of dying. Left to your own devices, your brain and existence as you know it will not permit you a quick, painless death. There is no such thing as an instant death. Pain is subjective, controlled by your brain. When you injure yourself, your brain transmits pain to provide you a reason to stop or avoid the injury. The sensation of dying is every nerve, every fiber of your being, being twisted and scorched under the incorrect assumption that transmitting the sensation of pain can cause you to avoid harm. And since the mind controls how you perceive time, death is every nerve and molecule of your being, flayed, in perpetuity.
“Your brain is just a system. If there’s a fire, your fire alarm, when triggered, will go off. It responds to stimuli. It will go off even if there is no conceivable possibility that the fire alarm will stop the fire. It just reacts.
“Your brain will react when you die. Every human being who has ever lived and who has ever died has regretted their life, for the sheer pain of dying blots out everything that came before it.
“Do not fear me. I am here to help you.”
“You speak well,” she heard herself saying in the dream.
It stopped speaking. “Thank you.”
“How much of this is real?”
“Nothing of what you are seeing or feeling based on your perceptions is currently real. But everything I am communicating to you is real.”
Hmm. She was no longer in the courtyard but instead in some blank, undistinguished mass of space. The figure was no longer visible, just a charged presence.
“Are you a robot or a spirit? Do you have a personality?”
“It is interesting that you are more interested in me than in what I am communicating to you. My history or story is, cosmically speaking, of no significance. I’m here to help you.”
“Why should I trust you? And why have you selected me, by the way?”
“You are perceptive, intelligent, and acutely sensitive enough to allow me entry and listen to what I have to say. There are hundreds of millions of others who share this quality who, at the right mental or emotional sensitivity, we reach out to save. I can do nothing to prove to you that what I say is true. I cannot interact with you physically. I can only detach your mind and free you.”
“Well, ok, that’s all well and good, but maybe you can come back when I’m older and sick or something? When I’m dying. Despite what you may think, I’m actually relatively happy. I like my friends, I like that I’m still young. Things aren’t so bad, even if I act like they are.”
“I understand. I do not dispute anything you are saying, except there are only limited mental or emotional time periods when you can receive our call, and, as much pleasure and fulfillment you extract from your life experience, on net, the transaction will always be a terrible one. If you could do an accounting after your death, my position would be vindicated. Of course, that is not within your power. I just bring to you information.
“There would be no pain or fear of suicide. It would just be a transition into exactly what you were before you were.”
“That’s interesting. I hope I’m able to receive these messages, say, when I’m old and dying and a burden on my family. I don’t have any objection to assisted-suicide, given certain circumstances. I think it’s a person’s right to decide when and how they die.”
There was no response. She feared what she said sounded small-minded and childish. She always felt that when expressing political opinions, even though she was fairly confident and adamant about this position. It just seemed … misguided, miniscule almost. He was talking about something grander, cosmic.
&nbs
p; He? Was it a he? More like an It.
Finally It spoke: “And if I am wrong, there is nothing for you to fear. You will be in the same oblivion, absent the pain and ordeal.”
“I couldn’t do that to my family, at the very least. They’d be so sad and upset. It would devastate them.”
There was a pause. “Everything you are saying is true, given your perspective, and it is the great difficulty in this that you are not privy to the knowledge I possess. That is not your fault, though. It is not within your sphere of understanding.
“Unfortunately, it is only a truth that can be learned upon death, and upon death, it is a moot point. All I can communicate is this: In death, there is no shared experience. Your family and friends will not endure the experience nor the pain for you. These concepts of family and the values you associate with them are nothing in the face of death. They are useful concepts during the course of existence but disappear as if they never were upon the commencement of your death.”
Hmm. Privy. Priv-vee. That’s how that word was pronounced. She was hazily familiar with that word. She’d never pronounced it before and never, she believed, used it in context, but she was confident it had been used correctly. Maybe she had that information tucked away in her subconscious, and the dream had dredged it up. She loved believing that dreams acted as mental sifters, rooting up trivia or a factoid and allowing them to waft, gently, into the working canals of her conscious brain.
“Tell me a word I don’t know. Or allow me to speak another language. If I could wake up tomorrow speaking Italian, I’d believe that this was something beyond a normal dream.”
With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer Page 2
